If you think the 2004 session of the Virginia General Assembly was a contentious one, think again. The coming debate on transportation funding, and the allocation of that funding in Virginia, will make that one look like a slumber party. And make no mistake, that debate is coming -- the fact that it was not addressed in the recently concluded budget compromise only speaks to its enormity and complexity.

Visualize a brutal, knockdown, shoot-the-prisoners, two-front war fought over a nice pie. That’s right, a pie. One front will be hand-to-hand combat over the size of that pie (the revenue, or tax fight). The other, perhaps more intense, will be over how that pie is sliced (the distribution formula fight).

Ideology will drive the tax fight. This is the one that will feature the traditional line-up of Democrats versus Republicans. In other words, this will be what is commonly thought of as the taxers vs. the anti-taxers.

Strict regionalism will drive the formula fight. This one will be northern Virginia versus the rest of the state. The Northern Virginia position will be: “We’re sick and tired of subsidizing everybody else in Virginia.”

A couple of points here:

First, Virginia’s unmet transportation needs are so massive that they cannot be fixed with anything short of preposterous increases in taxes of one sort or another. If it is to be the gas tax, something in the neighborhood of 50 cents per gallon is what it would take!

And second, you can’t pave your way out of congestion. More roads mean more cars means just that: more cars!

In 1997 the Commission on the Future of Transportation in Virginia estimated that the Commonwealth’s 20-year funding shortfall would be about $40 billion, yet the Department of Transportation had to cut $2.8 billion from the state’s Six Year Plan in May, 2002 because of funding shortages.

Where will that money come from?

The last major infusion of transportation funds came in 1986 when the legislature increased the gas tax by 2.5 cents -- to 17.5 cents per gallon. Since then, the only thing of significance that’s been done is to rob future revenue streams for current needs through the issuance of bonds.

Virginians consume about 11 millions gallons of gasoline per day, or about 4 billion gallons annually, a number that roughly doubles when jet fuel and diesel is considered. What would it take in gasoline taxes to raise another $2 billion per year? This one is too easy: 50 cents per gallon if it applied to gasoline only; 25 cents per gallon if it was laid on across the board.

Patrick McSweeney, former chairman of the Virginia Republican Party, writing last week in The Daily Press of Newport News, says our past transportation policies have left us with “an inefficient system that we can no longer afford to support.”

And he adds: “We should be exploring fundamental change in transportation policy instead of raising taxes to fund the same old approach.”

He is dead right about that. What we’re doing now is not working.

Throwing money at what we’re doing now is not going to fix it -- if we had the money to throw.

It is going to take money, and lots of it. There is no question about that. But before we get all worked up about where it is going to come from and where it will be spent, we need to radically re-think how we’re going about the business of providing a adequate system of transportation to the people of Virginia.

The model we’re using is f50 or 60 years old. It doesn’t work anymore.

It’s not so much that we’re not moving forward. It’s worse than that. We’re not even standing still. When it comes to transportation, we’re backsliding in Virginia.

Consider this for your next gift:
A 60,000 word collection of Barnie Day’s commentaries, entitled "A Mule Yule: Hey, Jesus didn’t ride in on an elephant," with an introduction by Jerry Baliles and forewords by Frosty Landon, Larry Sabato, Robert Holsworth,and Bill Wood, is available from the Democratic Party of Virginia. Contact Laura Bland, toll-free, at 1-800-322-1144